


And The Sidhe Dance

by FinnScathach



Category: Books of Faerie - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, dance au, dee does folk ballet, james is a folk dancer, let's see how it goes, literally i wrote this in 2013 and just found it
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-28
Updated: 2015-06-28
Packaged: 2018-04-06 15:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4227669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FinnScathach/pseuds/FinnScathach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A dance AU of Ballad by Maggie Stiefvater. James is an irritable folk dancer in a school better suited to ballet, and Nuala is a choreographer on the prowl for talent -- or is she? Meanwhile Dee is Dee.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And The Sidhe Dance

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in 2013 and just found it on my external harddrive. It'll probably be my relaxation project when I don't feel like writing anything 'original', so I may add to this over time. Just don't judge my writing standards on these opening pages -- it's been a couple of years.

Day eight at Thornking-Ash Dance Academy, and James Morgan was bored. More than bored: he was frustrated. He’d got in from his English lesson that morning (because apparently, being a gifted dancer wasn’t enough: you had to be able to analyse Shakespeare too) and flopped straight down on the floor, pausing only to clear his kilt and dance shoes out of the way first.

For the first four days, he’d been optimistic. They’d turn out to have a massive folk subculture and he’d meet a super-hot girl who also happened to play the bagpipes, or somebody would see him practising and invite him on a paid-for scholarship to Scotland or something. 

On day five, he’d started to realise that ‘dancer’ usually didn’t mean ‘folk dancer’. Actually, scrap that: when people heard that he did Highland dance, he could just see their eyes glazing over and a fixed look start to appear on their face, and once he mentioned his history in competitive Irish dancing he’d be lucky if they didn’t fall asleep.

By day six he reached the point where if one more person mentioned Riverdance, he was absolutely certain that he would batter their head in with a pointe shoe.

On day seven, his academic coordinator informed him that they didn’t have any practical classes for dancers ‘of his type’ and directed him to a teacher across town. A shred of optimism reappearing (because James was always the optimist), he drove over there, only to find that she was sixty and hadn’t danced in ten years. He very much doubted if her skills had ever been on a level with his, let alone if she’d be capable of teaching him anything, but being polite and well brought up, he thanked her and left.

He couldn’t have expected anything better. James knew there was effectively no one left in the state who could teach him anything, and that wasn’t even his arrogance speaking. Competitive Irish dance had been left behind along with awkward pre-pubescent scrawniness, but he’d been competing in Highland dancing right up until last summer, when he won the medal that got him his scholarship here. He’d placed first in a succession of competitions, championships, and festival dance-offs, without even really trying. There didn’t seem to be any point after that. 

(That is, if not really trying means only practicing two hours a day instead of four: the idea of a day off was alien to James, even if he was lazy in basically every other aspect of his existence. Dance was the only thing that mattered.)

Now it was day eight, and James was convinced that there was absolutely no point in him being here, unless that point was Dee. And to be honest, he was kind of fed up with Dee being the point to anything, since she was so totally not interested.

Not that he knew that for certain—he couldn’t know that for certain, because he hadn’t told her. She’d known him long enough that if she hadn’t worked it out by now, she was a complete idiot. Nevertheless, he was either here because he was an idiot and had thought TA would be different from every other dance school he’d looked at, or because of her. There was no way around that.

It would have been different, he reflected, if he’d been a ballet student like his roommate Paul. Then he’d have had daily classes and extra coaching and theory lessons that would have made the fees worthwhile. Hell, even tap or something had enough provision to attract a sizeable number of kids: they used to meet in the big studio with a couple of jazz musicians from the college over the road and jam until somebody collapsed.

Every few minutes, or whenever his eye rested on his half-empty timetable of classes, he’d wonder why they’d bothered offering him a scholarship when they knew full-well that he wouldn’t actually be able to participate in any of the activities that were supposed to release them from the school at the age of eighteen with dancing skills that would grant them acceptance into any company they wanted, probably with a side-order of academic fabulousness.

They had, though. They’d walked right up to him after he won that medal and handed him a business card. He hadn’t been planning to take it any further until he found out that Dee was coming too.

Deirdre Monaghan. His best friend. His completely oblivious but utterly beautiful and talented in every way best friend, who had danced a folk-ballet pas de deux with a complete stranger and won the Grand Prize for the entire competition, plus a full scholarship here.

And that wasn’t even the best part. Bitterly, James pushed himself up off the floor of his dorm room and shoved his crumpled kilt along his bed so that he could sit down. He should hang it up soon—it had been there since he changed out of it after a disappointing photo shoot for the Academy’s propaganda material. The best part was that Dee had been planning the entire thing as a solo and had practised the entire routine (with him watching and offering moral support along with occasional critique) on her own, choreographing it to work with the space … and then on the day of the competition, Luke Dillon had swanned in and coaxed her out of her shell into hitherto unexplored improvisatory skills of a pretty impressive nature.

And James was happy for her. Really, he was. He wasn’t petty enough to be jealous of the way Dee looked at him. It wasn’t even like it mattered that she was spending every freaking day with the guy while James sat in a corner and wished for the first time in his life that he’d taken up ballet at the age of five when Dee did, instead of stubbornly refusing to go anywhere near any dance form that didn’t require a kilt or a waistcoat. Dee had what careers advisors called ‘transferable skills’. Dee could fit straight into a ballet class even though her choreography was more suited to a ceilidh than an edgy, contemporary performance.

James did not and could not. 

Paul didn’t help. He was friendly enough, but James had the feeling he wasn’t great at putting his own issues into perspective.

“I’m just a back row dancer, you know?” he’d say. “Nobody looks at me. It doesn’t mean nothing unless you’re the principal. You know, nobody cares about the corps de ballet.”  
He would have had some sympathy if it wasn’t for the fact that the corps de ballet were in the full limelight compared to James—and also if he cared about back-row dancers, which he didn’t, because he never noticed them either.

There were some advantages to sharing with Paul. He actually got up when the alarm went off, and made sure James did too. As a result, they both made it to breakfast, even if the meal mainly consisted of too many overtired dancers squinting in the morning light and James trying to finish his essays over a bowl of cereal and generally being terrible company.

And this might have been a dance-specialist school, but they still had academic lessons too. Hence essays, hence Shakespeare, and hence ordinary, academic teachers. Most of them had some connection to the dancing world, so they mostly got the stresses and strains of being a physically gifted student whose interest didn’t necessarily lie in academia (but who might well end up there if an injury kept them away from the stage, since that was how half the teachers had come to their current profession), and James had to admit that they knew what they were talking about.

His favourite was Sullivan, who taught English. It was only day eight, and he’d already set them a bunch of murderous assignments, but his first-period classes were the reason James allowed himself to be dragged to breakfast, since it meant he’d by extension be on time.

“We’re going to study Romeo and Juliet,” Sullivan had announced at the beginning of the year. “I thought about Hamlet, but given that no one’s made a ballet out of that yet, I figured it wouldn’t be as useful to you.” Then he’d looked straight at James, “Though there might be other opportunities to appreciate Mel Gibson. Perhaps in something where he’s wearing a kilt.”

From that moment forward, James had been cool with Sullivan.

He didn’t much like Romeo and Juliet, not helped by the knowledge that he would never be in a ballet production of it and therefore it was probably less relevant than Hamlet, which at least had some good quotes. Even so, Romeo and Juliet was a lot shorter, and he’d rather be in Sullivan’s class than Linnet’s.

And they got to watch movies for most of the first week. That was, with Sullivan’s help they dragged two sofas into the classroom, ready for the serious business of comparing different adaptations. And, given that this was an English lesson, none of those were ballet.

Result.


End file.
